Inside out of Plato's Cave

 

Inside out of Plato's Cave ? I mean to show why Plato had it wrong in his philosophy, and why I cannot accept his analysis of the meaning of life or of what reality is. I want to let fresh air into the dank, darkness of Plato's age old fantasy of total knowledge; to turn Plato's cave inside out, and release his prisoners from their chains, to walk in a world unburdened of Plato's disdain of the earth and his totalitarian ambition for absolute knowledge.

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Plato's parable of the Cave occurs in his Republic (chapter 7). It summarizes the whole of the Platonic philosophy in quasi-­mythological or symbolic form. It occurs in the Republic at a climatic point in the argument, and is used to justify both Plato's theory of knowledge and his theory of the state. Indeed, it is the lynchpin of the book, and demonstrates that his theory of the state is a direct consequence of his theory of knowledge.

        In the parable of the Cave, ordinary men are chained inside a cave and forced to look at shadows of objects passing by on the wall opposite them. These shadows of implements, animals and men are carried by unseen people. The chained men assume “reality to be nothing else than the shadows of artificial objects."(7.515,c) One man, Plato's hero, manages to escape from the chains and to journey out of the cave into the world above, where he becomes habituated to the light. This world above to which the hero ascends, Plato identifies as the "intelligible region", which is the region of eternal truth, or of the Eidos or Ideas‑ the world of the Archetypes of Beauty, Justice, Truth and the Good. The contemplation of this heavenly, eternal realm, Plato identifies as the Sovereign Good, or rather as the activity that leads on to union with the Sovereign Good. The hero, who is Plato or Socrates themselves, or a type of both of them, is the man who through the intuitive Intellect, as distinguished from the reason or understanding, has the capacity to achieve total union with the Ideas that exist in the Mind of God. This hero, Plato later identifies with the Philosopher‑King, who is the ideal leader of the Platonic Utopia and exemplar of the Imperial tyranny of the Platonic theocratic state.

Plato contrasts this semi‑divine hero, with the chained men in the cave, whom Plato compares to slaves and prisoners, and whom he identifies with ordinary men, who are not capable of the ascent to the contemplative realm. The function of the hero is to convert these ignorant masses to the knowledge of the Sovereign good. These prisoners are entrapped in the sensory realm, and are therefore said by Plato to have souls like leaden weights, because "the eye of the soul" is closed in them. They are therefore slaves to shadows and darkness---whereas the contemplative man lives in union with the unearthly archetypes that exist in the transcendent world. The conversion of the prisoners to the Platonic State must be engineered by the elite philosophers' who Plato calls "guardians", and this engineering will occur by "persuasion and compulsion." (7,519,e)

This vision or parable separates Reality into dualistic sectors; the sector of the Cave, which is the sector of the ordinary world, seen as a place of base illusion, darkness and slavery, and the sector of the spiritual elite, the philosophers, who live in communion with Plato's Archetypal Ideas, as if they were, he says, like those on the "Islands of the Blessed." The first he identifies with the world of becoming and the second with the world of Being. The world of change and becoming is virtually identified with evil, except that evil in Plato's metaphysic, is called ignorance, since the emphasis is upon knowledge rather than morality. In any case, the world and the people in it only have meaning in relation to the Ideas, and thus are judged according to a strict hierarchical system of beliefs. And since the world that Plato describes is a world that is in a natural state of ignorance and forgetfulness of the truth, the only way to be redeemed from the dismal condition of the world is to institute a state that has total power and which can organize the complete reorganization and reeducation of society in view of Plato's absolute Ideas. To put this in contem8rary terms, Plato is the Arch‑dean of "political correctness", in the sense that the only~ true reality is the one which Plato advocates.

This pessimistic idealism, which conceives of the world as immersed in illusion, probably has its roots in Plato's background as an Athenian aristocrat. There are indications in his writing of his having belonged to one of the Orphic Mystery cults that then existed in Greece. The Pythagorean and Orphic sects in Greece were likewise world denying and relied heavily on mortification as a spiritual method. In any case, Plato's pessimism in regard to the created world, and his emphasis upon mental constructions of perfected principles, puts him squarely in the line of theocratic and imperial, gnostic philosophical and religious ideas that developed between 3000 B.P.. E. and 1500 B.P... Plato's conception of the state as an entity which serves a static and hierarchical ideology of absolute and unchanging truths is one shared by Egypt, whom Plato admired, and by India, which Plato knew little about. There is, I believe, ample evidence to suggest that Indo‑Aryan ideologies had filtered into Greece well before Plato's time, however, and that these influences were enshrined in Pythagorean, Apollonian and Orphic mysteries. But even if this historical conjecture were inaccurate, the social effectiveness of totalitarian metaphysical systems was already well known in Plato's time. The arising of metaphysical Systems, such as Plato's, at this particular time, can be explained by the discovery in many different places, of the fact that such metaphysical systems possessed enormous effectiveness as socially organizing principles: total knowledge generated systems of total power.

The Republic is a plea for total power through the acquiring of total knowledge. The Platonic state is a totalitarian state, which views the world as sunk in illusion and falsity, and which must use drastic measures to redeem and reorder the world. Plato justifies these measures by praising his own virtue as educator, and believes he is leading his society out of "the barbaric slough [mentioned] in the Orphic myth".(7,530,d) Mankind is immersed in a "barbaric slough", and only Plato's totalitarian philosophy can redeem humanity. Plato goes even further than this, and says that  the man that understands Plato's ideas, must necessarily desire to save the rest of mankind out of “Pity”(518,a‑b).This     strategy of having to create a totalistic in institution because mankind needs to be saved is an old standby, used in all totalitarian states. Hitler, Stalin, Mao as well as virtually all large scale religious institutions have justified their aspiration to power on similar grounds. It is interesting to see Plato use the same strategy. Plato is a pragmatist, and if power must be attained by claiming it out of "pity" and for the good of others, then so be it. Buddhism and Christianity use a similar kind of pretence of caring for others as a selling [point for their claim to legitimacy.

The ideal ruler, the "guardians" or Philosopher Kings are the "king bees and leaders of the hive". (7,520,b) These rulers, Plato tells us, must "have approved themselves in both war and philosophy." This conjunction of war and philosophy is interesting because it shows the relation of Plato's metaphysic to the will to power. The philosopher must be a warrior because the world does not conform to his beliefs. Plato's visionary Utopia, like all Utopias, must be imposed by force. Children are to be taken by force from their parents and given to the state to raise; labor is to be forced also; slavery is a norm; and a caste system is recommended perhaps as rigorous as the Hindu system. The Guardians are the nearly divine overseers of a totally planned society, like the Brahmins in India or the Priests in Egypt.

 

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The direct relation between a gnostic totalistic metaphysical system and a totalistic state is exampled most clearly in Plato's Republic. Plato's parable of the Cave outlines the basic requirements of such beliefs in symbolic terms. When one learns the basic pattern of gnostic totalism, then it is possible to see the pattern develop over time. The belief in the supremacy of an intellectual elite led to the creation of Plato's Academy, and eventually to Aristotle and Alexander, who was Aristotle's student, as Aristotle had been Plato's. The expansion of the Greek Empire under Alexander can be credited to the theories of gnostic supremacy bred into him through Aristotle and Plato, whose concern with the erection of a totalitarian Greek state was foremost in their philosophy. Alexander had himself declared a god. Even to this day, many Moslems think of Alexander in quasi-­divine terms. In other words, the vision of reality outlined in the parable of the Cave could only be realized by forced imposition upon the world. The necessity of expansion arises from the very nature of Plato's theory of knowledge. The world, in fact, is not constructed in Platonic terms, and Platonism is only true through radical reeducation and imposition by force. Platonism is basically a declaration of a war against nature and the world.

             Platonism naturally allied itself with Christianity because, Christ, like the Philosopher King, embodied an otherworldly truth that was unitary and absolute, and simultaneously, Christ advocated a radical rejection of the world such as it is, with the concomitant need to redeem the world that is “fallen”. Plato's parable of the Cave is so closely analogous with the Christian view of the fallen universe that it easily acts as a commentary on the Christian view of reality. The similarity of the Christian to the Platonic conception of reality was noticed very early

in Christian history, to such a degree, in fact, that virtually all the “church Fathers”, from St. John until Augustine, can be said to be Platonists to some degree.

            The rejection of this world as a veil of illusions, which only has value as a field of symbols through which the divine prototypes can be seen, naturally results in             a predisposition to , view the world either as a place of sacrifice or a place in need of radical restructuring. The erection of a totalitarian theocracy under Constantine in the 4th century A.D. is a logical consequence of Platonic and Christian metaphysics. The totalitarian expansion of the Christian‑Platonic and later the Aristotelian view of reality, resulted from its radical rejection of the world on the one hand, and a will to power through knowledge on the other. Because only Plato, Christ and Aristotle the world of the intellect ( or of “spirit” is real), and this lower world is unreal, except insofar as this world reflects the world Beyond, this world can be conquered, abused, exploited and used as an arena in which to exercise the will to power. Climbing the ladder towards total knowledge requires that the world be used with impunity, since the world is a lesser reality, and to reach the total truth of the reality of the Beyond requires that this world be transcended and sacrificed through acts of will. IN the world that is governed by Platonic and Christian principles, sacrificial militancy, missionary zeal, insatiable scientific curiosity and the creation of centralized states become imperatives if transcendence would be achieved.  In sum, then, the world must be conquered, with all the results of devastation that we wee around us.

The environmental, political and social atrocities of the modern world can be traced back to the Platonic pretension to total power through knowledge. The effect of believing that the world is an empty cave of illusion in which men are hopelessly chained is evidently false, since the result of this belief has been to actually turn the world into the impoverished and diminished reality that Plato imagined it to be. For centuries the world has been thought to be a place of illusion and ignorance, and anything so often thought eventually becomes a reality. If the reality of the world is threatened it is because of centuries of systematic "education" concerning its low and lesser nature, its despised status, its reduction to a sin ridden "barbaric slough",, as Plato called it. Plato himself, as well as Christ, needs to be reckoned responsible for this. Indeed, the traditional mentality of all the religions and totalistic systems of the past, from China to India, and from Europe to Egypt, were all involved in the creation of totalitarian metaphysical systems and the states that embodied these views. A "multiculturalism it that would accept all these philosophical and political constructions as of equal value is very naive indeed. The only way to prevent tyranny is to understand the motives and manner of operation of the will to power, and specifically, to understand the way in which ideas and symbols generate actions and states. Plato is a good place to begin such an analysis, because he is not only the father of western philosophy, but the deeper mystical aspects of his thought come from the east. If history teaches anything it is that men are everywhere the same. Plato is revered because he expressed a means of knowing reality in such a way that it could expand its political base almost indefinitely. The same ideas occurred in China and India and elsewhere. There is no reason to blame the west exclusively therefore. Plato expressed an idea that worked. But now it is time to recognize that it no longer works, and why it no longer works.

 

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Plato had it wrong. The world is not a dank, dark cave of illusions. One could even say that Plato had it backwards. The illusion is Plato's dream of total knowledge. His sunlit world of Ideas existing like diamonds of purity in the Mind of God seems nothing more than the dream of aristocratic supremacist longing for transcendent power. Plato's universal “ideas” are merely verbal generalizations created out of facts in this world. He was wrong to generalize particular facts into universal Abstract Ideas. Some thing that is “good’ Is not an emanation or radiation of an Idealized “Good”. A particular tree is not an example of an “ideal tree”. Plato made the mistake of falling in love with the creations of his own imagination. Because the world did not fit his dream, he fell to despising the world that we actually live in. The world that is not the dream of the Good becomes, in Plato’s vision, a bad world—a “slough”-- and needs to be reordered by force. The philosopher becomes a warrior because the world does not fit his idea and the Philosopher kings are the tyrants who will reorder reality to force it to conform with Plato’s vision. .

This is why Plato follows his parable of the Cave with an attack o democracy. Concern for the world, for nature and the beings upon it could only stand in the way of one who dreamed of a monolithic Philosopher King bent on dictating the minute details of everyone's life.

     Plato did not have the opportunity that Einstein had. Einstein saw his dream of a total explanation of reality turn into the nightmare that all such dreams turn into. Hiroshima spelled the end of apocalyptic dreams of total knowledge. After that the Masters of Knowledge could no longer plead their pure intentions, and the nobility of their disinterested pursuit of truth. The will to power through knowledge produces monsters. Einstein at least grasped something of this when he admitted. 11we are guilty." If only Plato could have heard this.

Plato had it wrong. This world is all we have. I cannot believe in Plato's divine ideas. I do not want a Good that lives in another world, or a symbol of that Good in this world. An individual act of goodness is enough. I do not want divine flowers, but flowers by the roadside. I do not want Love, conceived of as an idealized category, but acts of kindness that happen here, and offered by specific people who care for me. Plato's hero who claims to have escaped from the cave is a nightmare to me. I know Plato’s pity for me is just a form of pride. There is a kind of pity that kills and a compassion that destroys. I refuse to be entrapped by Plato’s proselytizing.

This world is what there is. Philosophies and sciences might tell me of other worlds, but I am free to believe them or not. I fear nothing so much as knowledge systems that use truth to generate power. I do not look for a Utopia, but a better world could be had if democratic states could restrict the acquisition of power through knowledge. This would require that even democratic and scientific powers be restricted in such a way that they could not perform unjust actions against human or nature’s rights. But this goes beyond the scope of my present concern, which was to point out that Plato's dream of the Cave was itself an illusion. Plato ended up himself being a cave from which we must escape.  Neither Plato's Cave of shadows nor the false idealization of Plato’s imaginary “divine” world of the Ideas is real. I have turned Plato’s Cave inside out and it is his “Ideas” and the myths of his religion and philosophy that would enchain people. It is Plato himself who is the cave of false idols. The world of sunshine and trees and deer in the forest is not Platonic. Plato’s world is not my world. Rejecting Plato brings one out of his cave of gods and idols into the light of the real world. An imperfect world without Plato's Cave or his Utopia is world enough for me.